The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675

by Bernard Bailyn

  These mingled images of natives in the alien lands of the Atlantic world—advanced but satanic people whose wealth and labor could easily be exploited; simple, innocent, natural folk whose resources were as yet unknown and who could presumably be led, through Christianity, to higher stages of civilization; and brutish, debased people condemned by their animal-like wildness to live beyond an exclusionary pale—such visions had little in common except barbarousness, paganism, and the threat of dark mysteries as yet unrevealed. The inconsistency of these images would in itself prove to be a force in race relations in North America.

  For the English, the native American world remained exotic, bizarre; it had none of the everyday familiarity it had acquired for the Spanish and Portuguese, who had lived and struggled, prospered and governed, in the western hemisphere for a century. The English venturing to the west had no fixed sense of what to expect, except that they were to encounter strange people, perhaps sophisticated, perhaps simple, undoubtedly savage. But despite all the strangeness, they would find that the two peoples had some things in common, and these common elements in their lives, along with the differences, would help shape the history of their violent interaction.

  THEY BOTH LIVED in worlds that were at least in part experienced as magical. In England Christianity, even Protestantism, had not driven out ancient beliefs in occult forces; in magic, white and black; in the power of soothsayers, conjurors, cunning men, wizards, diviners, and witches; in the ever-present threats of sorcery and devilish disturbances to the equilibrium of life; in the power of charms, curative rituals, and fortune-telling; and in ghosts, apparitions, and walking spirits. For the English, magic and witchcraft were not abnormal and extraordinary but commonplace and realistic, and that would be especially true in North America, for that distant land was known to be “one of the dark places of the earth,” one of the “wild partes” ultimately ruled by Satan and his minions; there the native priests were known to be “no other but such as our witches are.”10

  For both peoples, the environment, human and physical, was unpredictable, threatening, and miraculous, despite time-honored ritualistic forms of intervention. For most Englishmen, neither traditional counter-magic, science, nor technology had significantly mitigated the randomness of human misfortune. Like the American natives, they were destined to struggle against hidden, occult forces, to seek to obliterate the malevolent powers, and to match their capacity to manipulate the esoteric forces of life with that of their adversaries.

  Both peoples, too, lived precariously on the irregular bounty of the land. In good years England could support its growing population, but not all years were good, and in England as in America there were repeated harvest disasters—three devastating dearths in the sixteenth century—which led to periods of near famine. Both knew how fragile prosperity could be, how quickly security could be wiped out, how easily the balance required for survival could be destroyed—how vulnerable people were.11

  Both peoples, further, were familiar with man-made disasters—wars, massacres, and scorched-earth vengeance driven by fear and the passions of religious belief. Both believed in their own inherent military and cultural superiority and their capacity to absorb conquered adversaries into their own world and to “civilize” barbarous aliens.12 And both knew the horrors of physical cruelty. If the Indians sanctioned the torture of enemies and the most agonizing forms of execution, so too did the English. Ordinary crimes were punished by public floggings that could be severe, confessions were extracted by torture, and those convicted of treason and some felonies were hanged before large and enthusiastic crowds, cut down while still alive, disemboweled, castrated, beheaded, and hacked into quarters for display. Women were not mutilated, but for heresy, treason, or killing husband or master they could be burned at the stake, though compassionate executioners might strangle them before lighting the fire. And some of the most serious offenders were broken on the wheel—that is, spread-eagled in public spectacles, their bones smashed, their bodies eviscerated before final execution, their heads and quartered bodies displayed prominently in public places. England was spared some of the more “unspeakable litanies of suffering” that were known to be inflicted on judicial victims in central and eastern Europe—blinding, tearing with red-hot tongs, flaying, crushing into pointed stakes, sawing off of limbs. But in England too witches and heretics, like the Indians’ captives, were burned alive—not in rare instances, but commonly. Mary Tudor, in her reign of five years, burned nearly three hundred men and women for their Protestantism (technically, heresy); Elizabeth executed almost the same number for their Catholicism (technically, treason).13

  The fires of Smithfield and other places of execution burned deep into the awareness of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century English people, as did the terror, theatrically enhanced, of public, celebratory hangings and quarterings. John Foxe’s vast martyrology Actes and Monuments of … the great persecutions & horrible troubles that have bene wrought and practised by the Romishe Prelates… (1563, reprinted four times before 1600) was one of the most popular publications of the era. By 1684 some ten thousand copies had circulated, more than any other book except the Bible. It conveyed to generations of Protestants the fearful physical agonies, the tortures and persecutions, suffered by those who were loyal to their faith. The tale of Archbishop Cranmer recanting his earlier repudiation of Protestantism by putting his offending hand first into the fire so that “all the people might see it burnt to a coal before his body was touched” was the most famous, though not the most lurid, of the stories of martyrdom Foxe told in his 2,500 folio pages.14

  2

  It was from this advanced, modernizing world, still in many ways close to its medieval origins, that the first English colonists in North America were drawn. They were sent by the Virginia Company, one of the most ambitious of the enterprises in the burst of colonizing activity that followed the end of the Spanish war in 1604. A supervisory, guild-like organization, the company was chartered by the Crown to oversee the work of two investment groups formed to explore the east-coastal regions of North America for commercial possibilities, to set up trading stations at strategic points, and to discover access routes to the Pacific Ocean and the Far East. One group, agents of West Country gentry investors, sailed to the northern region, “Norumbega,” built a small fort at the mouth of the Kennebec River in Maine, and began trading with the natives. A severe New England winter, Indian attacks, dissension within the leadership, and a disastrous fire destroyed that enterprise within a year.15

  The second group, 104 passengers on three small vessels, were agents and employees of a syndicate of London merchants and their affiliates, major figures in late Elizabethan overseas commerce, who had taken over the rights to Raleigh’s abandoned settlement in the “Roanoke” region to the south and were intent on reviving it. After a troubled, quarrelsome, grimly protracted voyage of thirteen weeks, the three ships finally entered the broad expanse of Chesapeake Bay, then turned into the mouth of the James River, and began, warily, a slow reconnaissance into the unknown and mysterious interior of the land along that narrowing stream.

  They were a strange lot, these early English settlers in North America—not a cohort of settling immigrants but a band of adventurous gentlemen, younger sons of distinguished families, drawn to what seemed a fascinating adventure in an exotic land and a possible source of personal gain and national prestige, together with a small group of veteran soldiers of fortune and a contingent of artisans and laborers. Of sixty-eight arrivals in this first shipment to Virginia whose names survive in the records, thirty-seven were either gentlemen or military and maritime “captains.” Only twenty-seven were identified as artisans, laborers, and “boyes.” The status and high-level connections of the leaders were remarkable. Among the gentlemen were George Percy, brother of the Earl of Northumberland, then imprisoned for involvement in the Gunpowder Plot, and closely connected with Sir Walter Raleigh and his adviser, the scientist, linguist, and explorer T
homas Hariot, who had participated in the settlement at Roanoke in 1585 and written the first account of the region’s people, flora, and fauna; John Martin, son of the Lord Mayor of London and Master of the Mint, and brother-in-law of the highest law lord, the Master of the Rolls; and three members of the Gosnold family, prosperous Suffolk and Essex landowners and London lawyers, related to the Virginia Company’s merchant financiers and connected both to Richard Hakluyt, the geographer and colonial promoter, and to the family of Sir Francis Bacon, king’s counsel, later attorney general and Lord Chancellor.16

  They were forerunners of other members of highly placed, gentle or noble families who would follow to the obscure, often miserable riverside colony in the years directly ahead. Among those who appeared in Virginia in the next dozen years were four sons of Thomas West, Second Baron De La Warr and his wife, a first cousin, once removed of Queen Elizabeth; Christopher Davison, the son of Queen Elizabeth’s secretary, William Davison, MP and privy councilor; Sir Francis and Haute Wyatt, sons of substantial Kent gentry and grandsons of Thomas Wyatt, who had led the rebellion of 1554 against Queen Mary; George Sandys, the exceptionally well-educated and well-traveled son of the Archbishop of York and brother of Sir Edwin Sandys, a man of great influence in London who would be-come governor of the Virginia Company; George Thorpe, a former MP and Gentleman of the Privy Chamber, as deeply invested in Virginia property as he was in the conversion of the Indians; and John Pory, another former MP and official in several embassies in Europe and the Near East, whose services as an “intelligencer” disseminating news and up-to-date information would prove as valuable in Virginia as they had been in London.

  George Percy (illustration credit 2.1)

  George Sandys (illustration credit 2.2)

  Well connected, these adventurers of the upper gentry and aristocracy were educated and sophisticated. Davison, like Martin trained in the law, was a poet in a family of poets. Thorpe was a “student of Indian views on religion and astronomy.” Francis Wyatt wrote verses and was something of a student of political theory. Alexander Whitaker, MA, author of Good Newes from Virginia (1612), was the worthy heir “of a good part of the learning of his renowned father,” the master of St. John’s College and Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge. Pory, MA, who would become the speaker of Virginia’s first representative assembly, “protege and disciple of Hakluyt,” a translator from Italian and Arabic and formerly a teacher of Greek in Cambridge University, assured his patron, in a letter from Virginia sprinkled with Latin, that “nexte after my penne,” in “the solitary uncouthnes of this place,” he was determined “to have some good book alwayes in store” and begged for copies of the publications he was missing. And George Sandys, a member of Lord Falkland’s literary circle, continued, while in Virginia, to work on his translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.17

  In the first years of Virginia’s European history these representatives of England’s affluent intelligentsia would explore the Indians’ world, report on it, attempt to understand it and to conceive ways of exploiting it. And they would naturally attempt to assume leadership roles in the colony appropriate to their status. But in the first, desperate years of the colony’s founding, they were not the sole governors. The colony’s officially designated governing council included men of a different kind: tough, experienced soldiers of fortune who had volunteered for, or were drawn into, this open-ended project in search of employment, adventure, and ultimately perhaps exotic riches. They would discover adventure enough, but for most of them, as for most of the entire first generation of Englishmen in Virginia, instead of fame and fortune they would find early graves in the tidewater land.

  The freebooting style of these soldiers of fortune, all of them war veterans, “headstrong, giddy, and insubordinate,” their abrasive egos, and their explosive tempers, set them apart in the history of English colonization. It is less surprising that the annals of their sojourn in America record endless turmoil and conflict—that they were hopelessly improvident and constantly engaged in quarrels among themselves and in deadly warfare with the natives—than that the settlement they led survived at all.

  Nothing, for example, in the early career of Capt. George Kendall promised a tranquil contribution to overseas settlement. A veteran of seven years of warfare in the Low Countries, five times wounded, he had a zest for intrigue, having served as one of Lord Salisbury’s spies among the continental Catholics plotting to subvert England’s Protestant regime, and he was probably at the same time informing on the English for Spain. As one of the seven appointed councilors in the initial settlement of Virginia, he was no less an intriguer. He plunged into the plots and counterplots that soon distracted the colony’s leadership, was suspected of planning to desert the colony or defect to the Spanish, and was convicted of mutiny and perhaps treason. Six months after the ships’ arrival he was executed by gunshot on order of a drumhead tribunal.

  The fleet’s “vice-admiral,” Capt. Christopher Newport, had no less adventurous and rough a background. He had sailed with English freebooters to Brazil, joined Sir Francis Drake as an apprentice in his famous raids on Spanish vessels and territories, served for years as a captain of privateering vessels, lost his right arm, or hand, in a firefight with Mexican treasure ships, and then continued in a long career of plundering off the coasts of north and west Africa and in the Caribbean. An expert in assaults on Spanish American coastal towns, he was a prize employee for the London merchants who turned from privateering to commercial investments and overseas enterprises when the Spanish war ended. As “a mariner well practised for the westerne parts of America,” the grizzled Newport was an obvious choice to command the Virginia fleet of 1606.

  JOHN SMITH

  He may seem “Brasse without,” Smith tells his viewers, but he is “Golde within”—and a discoverer and civilizer of “Salvages.” (illustration credit 2.3)

  The key organizer behind much of that project, linking the lure of exotic exploration with commercial enterprise, was Capt. Bartholomew Gosnold, senior to the two other Gosnolds aboard the vessels of 1607 and another former privateer. Drawing on the contacts of his well-connected family, stimulating particularly the interest of his powerful kinsman, Sir Thomas Smith, governor of the East India Company as well as of the Virginia Company, Gosnold, who had led an exploratory voyage to New England in 1602, brought together the “first movers” of the enterprise, principally his elegant cousin, Edward Maria Wingfield—one of the company’s original patentees, a veteran of wars in Ireland and the Netherlands—and a recent acquaintance, Capt. John Smith.18

  The exploits of that extraordinary soldier of fortune, as Smith himself related them, were so wildly flamboyant, so bombastic and improbable, that generations of historians would later dismiss them as fiction. But we now know that his autobiographical accounts, though boastful and fancifully embroidered, are largely accurate. It is true, as he said, that as a teenager, having schooled himself in the art of war, he had fought against the Spanish in the Low Countries, thereafter had seen service in France, toured the Mediterranean on a piratical merchant vessel, and finally had joined the Austrian forces fighting the Turks. In Transylvania he had killed and perhaps had beheaded three Turkish officers in dramatic jousting duels (a feat he later blazoned on his coat of arms), was captured and enslaved by the Turks, but after noting carefully the way of life of the Turks, he managed to escape by murdering his owner with a threshing bat, and then made his way back to western Europe via Russia, Poland, and the German and Czech lands. Failing to find further military employment either in Europe or North Africa, he returned to England in 1604 where, through Gosnold, he was caught up in the plans for the colonization of Virginia.

  Courageous, exuberant, imaginative, impatient, ruthless, highly articulate, fiercely resentful of privileged authority, and endlessly ambitious, Smith was destined to struggle for leadership, to succeed in command of dangerous situations, and to trample on everyone’s sensibilities in the process. Before the initial vo
yage to Virginia was half over, in the cramped quarters of the pitching and rolling Susan Constant, he had come to despise the refinements and presumptions of the shipboard aristocrats like Percy and Wingfield, whom he knew to be incompetent, and to dispute the authority of the fleet commander, Newport. Fearful that his abrasive and insubordinate ways would lead to serious trouble—he might “usurpe the government, murder the Councell, and make himselfe Kinge”—the expedition’s leaders arrested him for mutiny and restrained him “as a prisoner.” They released him on landing, despite their belief that he was, as Percy wrote, “an ambitious[,] unworthy[,] and vayneglorious fellowe, attempteinge to take all mens authoreties from them … and ingrose all authorety into his owne hands.” But it would be he, in the few months of his ascendancy in Jamestown, who saved the colony from utter collapse, and it would be he who would secure for posterity a triumphalist interpretation of the colony’s founding and of his role in it, in his True Relation (1608) and his Generall Historie of Virginia (1624).19